The people of Braddock are fighting to save their hospital from the wrecker’s ball. UPMC, an $8 billion dollar corporation, wants to demolish the Braddock Hospital while building hospitals in wealthy areas. With the help of single payer advocates, Braddock is fighting back with daily vigils at the hospital to stop the demolition.

This is a reply I wrote to Bryce Covert, MJ, and Richard Kirsch, formerly of HCAN, at the New Deal 2.0 (ND20) site.

MJ expressed the view that both the private sector and Government are corrupt these days and that neither can be trusted. I agree with MJ about corruption in Government these days, but I think one has to distinguish among the branches of Government when it comes to corruption, and also the kind of corruption involved. The most corrupt branch of Government is Congress, because its members need huge contributions for re-election,and the sources of those funds are now drafting legislation in many cases.

Some executive departments such as The Defense Department appear to be more corrupt than others, because they are subject to influence from powerful defense contractor lobbyists. The electoral system has been corrupted over time to create a bias against the success of third parties. When combined with the development of a Supreme Court that is not defending individual liberty, there a great danger of the development of a plutocracy whose hard shell we won’t be able to crack to allow democracy to emerge from below. Perhaps the development of Information technology can provide a way around the institutions by giving people a way to self-organize that gets around the need for large quantities of money.

Dean Baker had an interesting post in HuffPo on August 2nd on the Alan Blinder/Mark Zandi study. It’s the best take on it I’ve seen thus far. He says:

“. . . A new study by Princeton University Professor Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, examined the impact of the TARP and the related Fed and FDIC bailout programs. The study found that without the bailout, GDP would have declined by another 6.5 percent and the economy would have lost another 8.5 million jobs. In other words, things might be bad now, but if we didn’t shovel trillions in loans and loan guarantees to Goldman Sachs and the rest of the Wall Street gang, they would be even worse.

Earlier today, I wrote about “sidecar reconciliation” and the difficulty of passing it, and concluded, in light of Lawrence O’Donnell’s remarks on MSNBC about parliamentary maneuvers, encountered a number of times each day, still needing 60 votes to overcome them, that Republicans can block HCR through reconciliation if they want to. I said, further, that if they do that, the nuclear option would be the only way for the Democrats to pass a positive Main Street agenda that could save them from blood baths in 2010 and 2012.

So what if we lived in a society in which fire departments only responded to emergency calls from those citizens who “could afford it”? What if the police protected from criminals only those citizens who “could afford it”? What if the firepersons and police persons were not financially eligible for the very life-risking services they were rendering for well-heeled others? What if you called in your emergency and your financial status had to be accessed to determine if you would be helped or left to your own bad luck crisis?

We cannot seek a public option-based health care reform in the context of an incremental legislative process specifically pressuring for that, and expect to be successful. We must seek and work for, and move heaven and earth for, only Medicare for All, whether we believe we can pass it or not, and then, if we do fail to pass it, we must be prepared to use the desire of others for any reform bill, to compromise just once on a Jacob Hacker-type public option, without entering a multi-stage de-generative reflexive process that will kill the Public Option as an instrument for getting to Medicare for All.

In my view, much of the health care reform movement made a great strategic error in this fight. And that error was to make the strategic goal a Public Option (PO) solution, rather than to make it a Medicare for All solution. That error has shaped everything else that much of the health care reform movement has done for the last year, and is the one thing primarily responsible for the sorry outcome we have on our hands now in both Houses of Congresses. I think we have to learn from the experience of the past ten months and stop boosting the PO, even a very strong PO, as if it were a strategic goal. Medicare for All, should be our standard, and we should evaluate our success or failure in political activity by how far we’ve moved the ball toward this goal, not by how far we’ve moved the ball toward getting a PO. The PO, even a Jacob Hacker-type PO, is at best a tactic relative to the overall strategic goal of getting to Medicare for All, and we should never forget that, or let other people forget that. Since it is a tactic, we should be treating it as a tactic, something we resort to in order to overcome blocking or resistance, not something we pre-compromise on, before even testing the strength of resistance to our efforts to get something better.

Feeling placated?

In the end, I think Alan Grayson’s spinning of this bill is “not telling it like is,” but yet another attempt by a politician to frame what the House is doing as its members would like us to see it, and to avoid giving us an honest picture of what the bill would and would not do. Grayson is telling the truth when he says that the bill would save lives and make insurance more affordable for those without insurance. But he is not letting us know that it won’t save enough lives, or insure enough people, or lower or stabilize private insurance costs as the years pass. So the question remains, is the bill good enough to vote for, or should progressives block it? I think they should block it and confront Obama and the blue dogs with the possibility of no bill at all. In the end, they have far more to lose personally then the progressives do, so that is the best way to get them to come around to a bill that will end the deaths, bankruptcies, and foreclosures, due to America’s nightmare health insurance non-system.

One final longshot chance to have the state single-payer waiver amendment restored to the House bill.